Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Day as Sentence (Chapter 1)

We are entering white water, nothing seems right, we
don't know where we are, the water is green, no white.

—Claimed to be the last words transmitted from
Flight 19 before it disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle

CHAPTER 1

It was about
time they played a familiar tune. I began singing along to keep from drowsing,
but soon realized I didn’t know any of the lyrics. Undecided then whether to
hum or whistle, whistle or hum, I tried flipping a coin in my mind and settled
on faking the words as I went along.

Memory is like this, I crooned, like
a song we think we know-oh-oh…

There was no end
to this fog. I considered yawning and reached for the cup of coffee I suddenly
remembered mid-gesture was already empty but had to shake anyway to confirm
before being able to refocus on the road.

The driver in
front simply had a busted taillight, though connecting that faint demon glow to
the other good taillight, to the car, to the person in it, proved to be a
protracted and convoluted mental transaction. I yawned and tapped the brakes to
keep up the delicate sensation of being alone in the universe, reduced now to
this dark, winding mountain road somewhere in western Massachusetts. As the frequency modulated
musicians faded into their final notes, I switched off the radio to preserve
this timeless state of being I’d entered into from commercial interruption. Watching
another dark mile vanish from my rearview mirror, I was spooked by a sudden
urge to let go of the wheel.

The fog infected
everything with a dangerous yet dreamlike delirium.

As the convertible
continued to burrow through the night, I knew it was only a matter of time
before my interior narrator would begin drawing discouraging conclusions from
dull observations again. The time was 2:51 am. You’ve been on
the road for over four hours. It’ll probably turn out to be for nothing. I
leaned over for a look at myself in the rearview mirror and saw the familiar
print of Picasso’s The Old Guitarist reflected over my shoulder on the bathroom
wall. The man replied, “Things as they
are are changed upon the blue guitar.” The wince seemed to precede the
philtrum nick. “Really? This is what you’re telling me?” I exploded suddenly
beside myself with fury. “So that’s life,
then: things as they are?”

It was pointless
giving this narrator a piece of my mind when I, by a preponderance of the
evidence, was in no way to be mistaken for the projection. The mirrorself,
smug, made no move to rebuttal as I finished taking off the beard with more
mindfulness. Slapping on some aftershave, I resolved to put in for some time
off as the sharp, alcoholic sting sang arias through every tired cell in my
body. The string of sixty- to seventy-hour workweeks that had culminated in a
disappointing compensation review had pushed my mid-life cliché to crisis and
left me with barely enough energy in the evenings to nurse a few drinks before
falling asleep in front of the television. Cultivating such life-denying
distractions only granted a very limited sort of access to a certain lowest common
denominator level of happiness that was nevertheless spoiled by a sad awareness
that what I ended up watching most nights were widely acknowledged cultural
abortions requiring very little thought.

You were so tense you had to conserve all your
energy just to withstand it.

I honestly couldn’t
make up my mind on where to go. The real problem was that I’d kept thinking in
terms of stepping into an entirely new life, the one I was actually meant for,
rather than in terms of taking a short break from this one, and two weeks was
really not enough time for all that. It was barely enough to de-stress a tick
or two before returning to work with a few anecdotes you’d polished to
entertain colleagues while waiting for elevator doors to slide open or meetings
to reach quorum. Maybe the sense that I needed something a little more
meaningful had led me to procrastinate, but before I knew it, I was officially
on vacation without having booked a flight or a room anywhere.

I’d gone home,
nursed a couple of drinks, and proceeded to fall asleep in front of the
television somewhere towards the end of an episode of The Real World, where the girl with the angel wings inked into her
shoulder blades seemed to want to communicate something urgent to me,
personally, on the other side of the screen, before I vanished into a fractured
unconsciousness, or a fade to black from her side. It must’ve been around 2am
when it hit me that I was actually on vacation, free to do what I wanted. Not a
bad feeling at all.

The mind's major journey now is to find its way
back through a depth of surfaces to a childlike wonder where vacationing
becomes an impenetrable state of mind.

After finishing
a full pot of coffee the next day over a leisurely brunch with a
typographically complex newspaper, I’d tidied up around the apartment to my
Korean language CDs. If you had driven
more carefully, you wouldn’t have had that accident, I repeated in the
third conditional. This was the grammatical structure that allowed one to think
about unreal situations in the past. With the laundry folded and dishes stacked
away, I was about to power down the laptop, but then decided instead to turn my
attention to the long-neglected novel figuring that if I wasn’t going on
vacation, I might as well work.

I’d fixed myself
a Hendrick’s gin martini (which gave the scent of a scene: so he asks my
character, Grant, you like ‘em wet or dry? I like ‘em wet, I reply, trying to
approximate his peculiar Midwestern patois, and then wait a beat before
pretending to be telling him a side-handed secret: like my women, I whisper. He
pretends gross feminist offense. With a twist, please, I specify, returning to
my normal voice. I wonder if he’s ever messed with anyone’s drink. I consider
how much he would need to mess with mine for me to send it back. Penis-stirring,
I confirm silently to myself) while waiting for the manuscript to print. Then I
took both out onto the balcony where I spread open the parasol and sank into
the now shaded but still warm pages, pausing over paragraphs to make notes to
myself in the margins. It wasn’t until I reached the end that I even noticed
the trembling in my body. The temperature had dropped unseasonably,
unreasonably, and furthermore, unkindly, as if the early August sky could
somehow recall the bitterness of being born in winter, and dimming, lazily
announced the first few stars of a night’s midsummer dream. I scratched at
phantom bug bites, the body’s memory with mosquitoes. The day had been one long
blur of a sentence whose period had nevertheless come. I’d kept shivering,
staring up at the darkening sky until it’d dawned on me that the stars had been
there all along.

Recognize anything?

Reading about my narrator waiting for a
mysterious woman in a Brooklyn café made me remember that teenager putting up posters
in a bus depot in Cameroon.
A few chapters later, I remembered the night it occurred to me that it should
occur to my character that suicide was really for the young at heart. My
thoughts and memories responded to each scene as if they had originated in me,
only I couldn’t remember writing them out. The actual sentences felt foreign,
and page after page, I could only recall what stirred behind the written words
like indistinct shadows in a cave. I thought about working the idea of someone
else with access to my memories abandoning a novel for me to finish into the
present novel somehow.

I got up from
the chaise, stretched, and went inside to attempt the perfection of another martini.
As I twisted the lemon zest, watching the citrusy spray settle over the chilled
surface of the drink, I had what might pass for some as an out-of-body
experience. All of a sudden, here was this moving, acting “I” who tasted the
drink and topped it off with more gin, who put everything away, wiped down the
counter, and pulled on a sweater before returning to the balcony to find half
the pages had blown off the side table. And with that, he was gone. Gone with
the wind. Honestly, kid, who gives a
fuck? I heard him paraphrase just before disappearing into some Bermuda triangle of the mind. I drank my drink, pulled
myself together, and wearily gathered what pages hadn’t blown into the abandoned
lot below.

Something about
the lonely rattle of a rickety shopping cart just then (reminded me of that
indefatigable voice imploring passers by tohelp feed the homeless, help feed the hungry, again and again as I’m waiting
for the longest red light to change on the corner of 31st and 7th
on my way in to work until this one time as the signals switch and the halting
hand blinks into a man supposedly in motion, I think I hear him say to help feed
the homeless to the hungry), influenced by the strange effects of an orange supermoon
poised low between two buildings, sirens blaring in the distance, and a woman’s
laughter floating up from the patio bar around the corner, conspired in me, and
I suddenly saw myself flinging the rest of the pages clear off the balcony. As
I watched the white, serene sheets flutter through the early evening air down
past the windows of my neighbors on the lower floors, the silence in my head
came to resemble the flurry of snow in a thoroughly shaken paperweight. It was
liberating, in its own way, like tearing a thousand losing lottery tickets into
a million confetti-like, if celebratory, pieces. Call it my private party contribution
to an abandoned lot already so littered with construction debris, cigarette
butts, broken beer bottles, and the excrement of half the neighborhood dogs.

This is the story of your life, reminded the narrator.

I lay in bed
that night thinking about this story and how it wanted to end. Maybe the story
just needed to be put out of its misery, but this led to thoughts about life in
general, and I fell asleep with a profound sense that I really was well past
the point where I needed to know what the plot was about.

The next
morning, I’d forced myself to sit at the desk for a few hours marking up newly
printed manuscript pages in red ink, getting up only for bathroom breaks and
bourbon, forgetting to eat, and then another few hours deciphering the
elaborate system of strikethroughs and additions scrawled between lines and
spilling into the margins with arrows and footnotes referencing other footnotes
on the backs of pages, and made still further changes as I incorporated these
handwritten edits electronically into a revised document that any critic could
tell still lacked a definitive engine, some fundamental mechanism driving the
plot.

I turned on the
radio, already tuned to a local classical station, and fixed myself a Woodford
Reserve Manhattan as I had just before pissed out what would probably prove to
be the last of the gin, thinking Chopin certainly knew how to waltz up and down
those keys.

I stepped out
onto the balcony to clear my head only to be blindsided by yet another vision
of the endless telescoping of days. Construction debris, check. Cigarette
butts, plenty. Broken beer bottles, you betcha. Dog shit. I could smell it from
here. But curiously not a single page in sight, a fact that I would come to puzzle
over sporadically throughout the remainder of the week.

Eventually, I settled
on moving forward a chapter a day, but over the next few days, the work
progressed very mechanically (better your
work than your sex life), with rhythms imported no doubt from what I could
no longer kid myself, almost seven years later, as being just a day job. I
reached the last page only to find myself exactly where I left off over a year
ago, right back where I went wrong, with no real idea what the story was about
or where it wanted to go. Using the last page to catch my fingernail clippings,
I coolly considered killing off a character or two. Naturally, one would have
to be the narrator.

You would hope that so much thinking and writing would
lead somewhere.

Maybe mining the
raw material was behind me, and maybe all that was really left was to refine it
for a shape and structure that the material itself would suggest—naturally,
magically, or otherwise; I was open to suggestions—but the lifeless lines
remained silent, and left me feeling far from equal to the task. Anything good
demanded a certain level of sustained concentration, and I knew beforehand that
writing in this mode, living in this mode, bit by bit through the years, would
only produce inferior results.

A belief in your dreams demands disbelieving in the
facts that surround you.

The following
few days, I guess I’d fallen into something of a funk, with all the torturous
thoughts that accompany this overriding sensation of nonexistence symptomatic
of writer’s block. I locked myself up in the apartment so that my only contact
with the outside world were the guys who brought ethnic food to my door. What are you doing with your life? they’d
ask in various fake accents and disguises, counting out my change as I
calculated in my mind how much cash I could come up with on short notice, and
how long it might last me in a country like Thailand
or Mexico
or wherever the food happened to be from.

One night, I
even found myself chatting up an absent Amber, seeing the whole twenty-minute
conversation play out in my head, concrete and inevitable, like a scene just
before I’d write it down. I thought about calling her in California, but just touching the receiver
somehow transmitted the somber, freighted realities of our relationship, and I lost
all nerve as they sank in.

I didn’t open my
mail, didn’t watch television, didn’t connect online. I did nothing to remind
me that there was even a world out there that I was very actively ignoring. I
thought about everything that I could be doing but wasn’t, choosing instead to
pass the time looking through old shoeboxes of memories, rereading unsent love
letters, doing pushups and sit-ups, testing how long I could hold my breath
under water in the bathtub, rearranging the furniture. I imagined what I would
do if I were stranded on an island, if I won the lottery, if I met the next
love of my life. I compiled mental lists of other people’s secrets, other
people’s joys, other people’s sorrows. I could lay in bed for hours before
thinking of a good reason to get up. I’d spent most of my time lying down, and if
not in bed, then on the yoga mat, or in the tub, or on the couch. And when I
wasn’t horizontal, I found myself pacing round and around, with my thoughts
racing in similarly fervent, if futilely fashioned, circles. I started drinking
before breakfast, or whenever my first meal happened to be that day.

Then last night,
I dreamed something horrible, only all the horror was underneath, and what made
it worse was that it was the only dream I remembered having all year, maybe
more. These days, when I slept, I seemed to lose consciousness for only a matter
of seconds, not enough time to reach the REM stage of dream production, but
sure enough, the night would have passed, and in the morning I would wake up
feeling fully restored with the will to face yet another day.

In this
particular dream then, Eli was running after random pages and shouting out
random lines from my unfinished manuscript, which the wind scattered up and
down a deserted shore. He performed football tackles and moonwalks in the sand.
He waved at us, at Amber and I, playing cards on an immaculate beach blanket.
Eli shouted something that got lost in the wind. “What?” we shouted back
simultaneously, as if calling for the punch line of a joke we’d heard too many
times mistold. “This is the story of your life!” he shouted goofy and giddy
with glee. Amber’s eyes flashed a conspiratorial smile over her cards before
she fanned them out on the blanket to reveal a royal flush.

It was a few
moments later, before I even realized we’d been playing poker, that I woke up
in a cold sweat feeling like her hand had changed my fate somehow, forever and
for the worse, and that the only person who could set things right again was
Eli.

The first time I
called him earlier in the day, there wasn’t an answer. I called again a few
hours later and left a message. Then I tried his cell, which was no longer in
service. Another hour later, I called and someone picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Eli,” I
said, strangely relieved. “It’s Grant.”

After all these years,
it left me wondering whether we’d parted friends when he hung up.

I tried the
number again and again, but no answer. I kept getting the machine each and every
time until I realized that calling wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

So here I am.
Listening to Hotel California on the radio. The one song I recognized all night—one
that somehow always manages to put me in a weird place.

We are all just prisoners here of our own device.

Billboards began
to reappear as the road straightened out past the mountains. Picture Your Ad
Here. I rolled up the windows and turned on the heat to the highest setting.
Then fumbling with the buttons and knobs on the radio, I imagined ringing his
buzzer, him turning on one light after another to reach the door still groggy
and speechless, but starting to smile. Holy
shit! I swerve in the nick of time to avoid a woman in a faded yellow nightgown
hovering over the middle of the road, her feet clearing several inches off the
ground, and the last thing I see before passing out is a trail of sparks in the
rearview mirror.

About Me

Ideas turn me on.
Grant Koo is a novelist, short story writer, recovered poet, blogger, pop culture critic without thumbs, and Senior Managing Editor at WebMD—though only one of these provide him with any income to support his habits, which can range from the utterly mundane to the morally questionable. He lives with his wife and daughter in Jersey City, NJ.
Book 3, which completes the self-fulfilling trilogy, is now available.
LIFE'S WORK: BUT ANOTHER PIXEL IN LCD REALITY
A son discovers an unlikely literary inheritance while going through his dead father's things to decide on what to keep, what to donate, and what to throw away. In his somewhat untethered state, he attempts to complete one of his father's unfinished works, but when the son becomes an unexpected father himself, a spiritual wormhole opens up and threatens to swallow his whale of a story whole.
Pub date: Dec 2016
FRAMING THE STORY
Pub date: July 2015
AND THE PAST WENT ON BREATHING
Pub date: Sep 2012
#GrantKooLovesYouToo